


the bruises you left behind

by somnambulants



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, eve is 'dead' and villanelle sends her letters basically, set post season 2
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-29 18:41:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19025680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somnambulants/pseuds/somnambulants
Summary: It’s not long after she settles into her new ‘home’ that she finds a relatively inconspicuous envelope in her mailbox.She knows who it’s from the second she flips it over and sees the childlike rendering of a broken heart scrawled in Lieu of a return address on the back.





	the bruises you left behind

It’s not long after she settles into her new ‘home’ that she finds a relatively inconspicuous envelope in her mailbox. 

She knows who it’s from the second she flips it over and sees the childlike rendering of a broken heart scrawled in Lieu of a return address on the back.

 _I am hurt,_ Villanelle starts. Eve wonders if her writing in red ink was intentional. The _U_ in hurt loops and overlaps with the _R_ which slices neatly through the _T_. 

Swallowing heavily, she keeps reading and the mix of indignation and accusation in Villanelle’s words practically leaps off the page and jams itself down her throat. _I thought you were special. I thought we were the same, I thought --_

__

Eve sits at her kitchen table and hyperventilates for an hour. 

She wonders how Villanelle managed to find her — how she’d even known where to look or _who_ to look for — because as far as anyone in the world was concerned Eve Polastri had died six months ago.

—  
After she receives the letter (the first of many, even if she doesn’t know it yet) she sleeps with the lights on for a week, feeling stupid because leaving the lights on only makes it easier for Villanelle to kill her — not that darkness could stop her if she’s set on it. 

But days pass and nothing happens. A week goes by. Still nothing.

Villanelle knows where she is, clearly, and she could come for her if she wanted to and yet nothing. 

Eve doesn’t know what she’s playing at, but she suddenly, very acutely, feels like she’s being hunted. 

—

“Unfortunate,” Carolyn had said. She’d been the first thing Eve had seen when she’d opened her eyes to a clinically white room and she was looking at Eve with something akin to disappointment and irritation on her face. “Very unfortunate.”

Eve hadn’t said a word; hadn’t even let herself breathe. She’d waited for the inevitable — wondering if Carolyn would do it herself or if she’d have hired help to do It for her.

Instead, Carolyn had stood, dropped a blank envelope on her bed and walked out of the without a single glance back.

(The envelope contained a plane ticket, a passport and a note with the words: ‘ _disappear’_ on it.

And thus, in a matter of hours, a heart-rate monitor flatlined and Eve Polastri effectively ceased to exist.)

—

The next letter comes a week after the first. 

Villanelle writes to her in pink gel pen this time. It’s only one sentence: _I’ve been thinking of you. Have you been thinking of me?_

Eve reads it three times and wonders whether it’s a warning or regret she can see twined around each of the intricately curved letters. 

— 

The Gold Coast is quiet and sunny. Eve hates it but Eleanor, ‘born and raised’ in a country that is the equivalent of a desert, supposedly loves it.

To be fair, Australia isn’t the worst place Eve has ever lived. It’s just the whole being figuratively dead and no one can know she’s actually alive or she’ll be _literally dead_ that kind of puts a damper on the whole experience.

She sits on golden beaches and stares out at the waves and wonders when her life became the disaster it is now. 

Of course the answer always comes back to one person. 

—

Time is inevitable. As it passes, she takes up yoga and makes ‘friends’ that she always has a convenient excuse not to see outside her classes; she goes to farmers markets and collects tiny cactuses to display on her kitchen windowsill; she even gets a cat. 

Sometimes, in moments of weakness, she thinks about reaching out to Niko but then quickly thinks better of it. 

She doesn’t want to involve him in more danger. 

And really — there’s not much point in beating a dead horse, is there?

—

After one particularly prickly letter ( _darling, some days I wish I’d just shot you in the head_ ) Eve sits down at her little kitchen table and starts to write back. 

_Oksana,_ she uses Villanelle’s real name because she knows she’d hate it and simultaneously feels powerful and childish all in one: _do you ever look at yourself and wonder how you became the person you are? The monster?_

After a second, she sighs and scribbles out the word _monster_ , hating the guilt she feels over using it.

She has no sending address for her letter — not that she’d send it if she could — so she puts it in an old cereal box and then shoves that under her bed. Out of sight, out of mind. 

Funnily enough, the phrase had always worked for her. For everything but Villanelle.

—

_Dear Eve, how are you feeling?_

__

__

_Dear Villanelle, kind of like you shot me in the stomach._

 

—

She often wonders if the letters are just Villanelle’s way of torturing her, because it definitely feels like it. It kind of feels like she’s being toyed with; like it’s Villanelle reminding her that she can never escape her, not even via death. 

 

—

The next one isn’t a letter, but a postcard. When Eve turns it over, there’s a wreath of forget-me-not flowers on the back. 

_Do you ever think about when you stabbed me?_ Villanelle writes. Neon purple this time. _I think about when I shot you a lot._

“Yes,” Eve answers the question out loud. It echoes in her tiny kitchen. She stares down at the grain in her kitchen table, tracing over all the tiny imperfections in the wood. 

She can see Villanelle covered in blood; viscerally feels the panic she’d felt and the knife dropping from her hand and then the regret — the _why the fuck did I just do that?_

(Most vividly, she remembers watching Villanelle walk away after she’d pulled the trigger and wondering if the blinding pain was from betrayal or the bullet in her stomach.)

—

 

A few weeks pass by with no letters and Eve hates that she’s worried — what if something had happened to her, what if they’d caught her, what if she was _dead_ — until a box arrives one day. 

It stands on her doorstep, completely innocent looking, but Eve knows who it’s from. She hasn’t gotten one thing that hasn’t been from her since she’d moved here.

Setting it down on the counter gently, Eve opens it with trembling hands and almost drops it when she sees whats inside.

Wrapped in tissue paper sits the gun Villanelle had shot her with. There’s no note. 

Eve takes it as what it is — a threat.

—

She’s sitting in a park one day, reading Villanelle’s newest letter (it’s really just a crumpled up napkin with a bloody-red coloured kiss imprinted on it) when someone taps her on the shoulder.

“Do you mind if I—“ she squints to block out the sun and finds a relatively young woman pointing to the spot beside her. 

“Oh,” she says. “No, of course.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she watches the woman as she starts flipping through a book; the way her dark hair settles over her shoulder, the way she bites her lip every now and then.

Eve wonders what it would feel like to put her hands around her throat and _squeeze_.

Abruptly, she feels sick. 

“I, uh —“ she doesn’t finish, just makes some vague motion with her hand and walks away as quickly as possible, ignoring the way the woman calls after her, probably because she’s left all her belongings on the seat back there, all except the napkin that she’s still clutching in a clenched fist.

 

—

 

_Dear Eve, i’m sorry._

__

__

_Dear Villanelle, you’re full of shit_.  
—

Months go on.

The letters keep coming like clockwork and, like clockwork, Eve writes her replies and then shoves them in the cereal box under her bed. 

When she goes to put the most recent one in there, she realises with a shock it’s almost full to the brim. 

—

 

_Dear Eve, did you ever think about saying yes?_

__

__

__

_Dear Villanelle, yes._

She starts again: _Dear Villanelle, how could you think otherwise?_

Sighing, she scribbles that one out too and finally just writes: _Dear Villanelle, sometimes I wish I had._

—

For months she puzzles over why she’s getting the letters and she comes up completely empty every single time. 

Villanelle’s words: _‘I feel things when I’m with you’_ from all those months ago repeat over and over on a loop in her mind and she wonders how much of that was Villanelle, the person, and how much was Villanelle, the manipulator. 

She hates the fact that it doesn't seem to matter so much anymore.

—

Her year of being (not) dead ends eerily the way it started.  
But the second time she kills someone is wholly unlike the first. 

She’d thought the gun Villanelle had sent her was a threat at the time but maybe it’s a blessing in disguise because one night man follows her home from the grocery store and Eve, by chance, is carrying Villanelle’s gun.

He wraps a hand around her throat and shoves her against the alleyway wall so hard the brick digs into her shoulder-blades. “Don’t worry, you’ll enjoy it. They always do.”

“Yeah,” she says calmly, fingers twitching around the handgun in her coat pocket as she looks him in the eye. All she can see is what he’s probably done to countless other women. “I think I will.”

She chooses to shoot him in the neck and doesn’t think about the fact that he would have suffered less if she’d shot him in the head. Instead, she stands over him and watches as the light leaves his eyes and thinks: _good riddance._

Of course, this means she has to leave. The body is discovered the next morning and as bad as it would be to be caught as a murderer, it would be even worse for her to be caught as _alive_ when her death certificate had been signed, sealed and delivered a year ago. 

After less than five minutes of scrolling through the airline website, keeping one eye on the news playing on her TV — _horrific death of small town father of three_ in writing at the bottom of the screen — she knows exactly where she’s going.

With a click of her mouse, she books a one-way ticket to Alaska.

**Author's Note:**

> let me know what you think!
> 
> also on Tumblr [here!](https://somnambulants.tumblr.com/post/185243914786/the-bruises-you-left-behind)


End file.
